girl's attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it,
giving him, as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the
kind of ruminations she would in general be governed by--which
were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadn't
natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they
wouldn't try to supply the place by artificial, by make-believe
ones, by any searching of highways and hedges. Oh yes, they had
acquaintances enough--but a marriage was an intimate thing. You
asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and kin--you asked
them over and above. But you didn't ask them alone, to cover your
nudity and look like what they weren't. She knew what she meant
and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her,
finding a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her,
desired her, to have character; his wife SHOULD have it, and he
wasn't afraid of her having much. He had had, in his earlier
time, to deal with plenty of people who had had it; notably with
the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle, the Cardinal,
above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his
education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset
him. He was thus fairly on the look-out for the characteristic
in this most intimate, as she was to come, of his associates.
He encouraged it when it appeared.

He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in
order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in
his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It
would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the
Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining to-night in
Portland Place, where Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting
that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. But what